Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I had a friend call me last week in an absolute panic. Their whole department is being given to a consulting company, starting in January. Everyone in the department must re-apply for their jobs and the pay cut is 15-20%. The benefits from a consulting company versus the firm are worse and the cost is higher.

Folks, these companies don't care about you as they did your parents or grandparents 40 years ago. They have no remorse on cutting your salary, making your premiums for insurance and everything else higher. They only care about its companies bottom line and if they can rah-rah it on the stock market, only the top elusive folk benefit. Everyone else, like you? Not so much.

I am going to be a stickler about jobs in this country. Sure, President Obama inherited a huge mess, but by this time next year it is HIS MESS. The Republicans, if they can get it together, needs to present to the American Public why they should vote for them, but more so, where they can be inventive on creating JOBS for the millions of Americans out of work. That is the Republican problem, as they continue to say NO to everything, they continue to offer no solution to anything. Until they can figure this out, they will continue to be the party with the names of Limbaugh, Beck and Dobbs.

And the Democrats and Obama, this economy needs to turn around and jobs need to come back to this country. That is YOUR task and to energize your very base as to why to continue to come out to vote for you. The notion of Obama inherited this mess only lasts for so long. Next year are the mid-term elections and after watching in the thousands line up for federal assistance for housing and heating was heartbreaking. Estimated 50,000 showed up, but only 3,500 applications will be granted.

It is not only the economy stupid, but it is JOBS.

The dark blue captain’s hat, with its golden oak-leaf clusters, sits atop a bookcase in Bryan Lawlor’s home, out of reach of the children. The uniform their father wears still displays the four stripes of a commercial airline captain, but the hat stays home. The rules forbid that extra display of authority, now that Mr. Lawlor has been downgraded to first officer.

He is now in the co-pilot’s seat in the 50-seat commuter jets he flies, not for any failure in skill. He wears his captain’s stripes, he explains, to make that point. But with air travel down, his employer cut costs by downgrading 130 captains, those with the lowest seniority, to first officers, automatically cutting the wage of each by roughly 50 percent — to $34,000 in Mr. Lawlor’s case.

The demotion, the loss of command, the cut in pay to less than his wife, Tracy, makes as a fourth-grade teacher, have diminished Mr. Lawlor, 34, in his own eyes. He still thinks he will return to being the family’s principal breadwinner, although as the months pass he worries more. “I don’t want to be a 50-year-old pilot earning $40,000 a year,” he said, adding that his wife does not want to be married to a pilot with so little earning power.

In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression.

State workers in Georgia are taking home smaller paychecks. So are the tens of thousands of employees in California’s public university system. The steel company Nucor and the technology giant Hewlett-Packard have embraced the practice. So have several airlines and many small businesses. read more here....

And these pay cuts? How are people suppose to SURVIVE? The inflation is not going down, the grocery bill is not reducing, the car note is not declining, the basics of living is not cheap. And it is supposed to just be ok?

subscribe hereicebergslim on Daily Kos ShareNote: If you are viewing this in Firefox, on 17" monitor or smaller, the left panel may be blown. This is a firefox issue, if you view this in IE, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, no issue. FYI.